Picking a headless CMS in 2026: the four-question test
Forget feature matrices. Answer four questions about your editors, your locales, your integrations, and your runtime — and the choice writes itself.
Picking a CMS should take one meeting, not six months.
1. Who edits, and how often? If your marketing team edits daily and hates JSON, you need a visual editor — Storyblok or Contentful. If your editors are developers, Sanity's Studio is the best tool on the market.
2. How many locales? Dato has the best localization model at the field level — one record, many locales, clean API.
Referenced in this article
A 1,400-page SAP marketing site, edited by 40 humans without conflict.
3. What's already in your integration stack? If you need custom webhooks and TypeScript SDK coverage, Sanity or Dato. If you want a visual editor your non-technical stakeholders can demo, Storyblok wins the boardroom.
4. Where does the site run? Edge-rendered Next.js on Vercel or Cloudflare? Any of the above works. Answer those four questions honestly and the choice writes itself.
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